Excepts of an essay by Rebecca Sweetman presented to the National Farmers Union 2022 Convention
I’m Rebecca Sweetman, a non-certified organic permaculture farmer using regenerative practices on a mixed, biodiverse 25 acre farm in Prince Edward County on the unceded territory of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabek and Wendat. I have spent my life trying to find the chink in the armor of our oppressive global paradigm and find the means to actively design a way out of gendered, racialized capitalism and patriarchy. I do this now through anti-capitalist farming as collective resistance.
Our broken social, political, and economic systems falsely assert that it is modern capitalism that gives life. The hold of capitalist realism in farming is a chokehold. Capitalism is the invasive dog-eat-dog strangling vine species that poisons the soil, debilitates the landscape, and radically alters the potential for native life. There are no baby steps, handholding, “there, there, it’ll be okay” measures in the management of invasive species. We need to see it, root it out, dispose of it responsibly, and focus on the recovery of native life. But to do this, we first need the alternative models, the understory growth to emerge, and this is the paradox that is our present condition: capitalist realism kills the potential for viable alternative models, and we cannot kill capitalism without a compelling idea of where to go next and what successful models might look like.
I am sure that many of you are also working tirelessly in these future-making efforts, although within the limitations of present paradigm confines and the precarity of individualist capitalist realism. We are not yet fully able to work collectively toward these dreams, and I will talk about this isolating individualism and privatization as a deliberate prong of the capitalist pitchfork. The other three tines on that fork are corporate omnipotence, fear and control, and the dependency on money and its debilitating effect on our critical creativity. In the lamentation and provocation that follows, I reveal some of the very tangible ways capitalist imperative is entrenched in Ontario’s farming practices and the barriers I have found in my experiments of anti-capitalist farming, which I define as regenerative, collectively life-supporting farming for a sustainable and resilient future, not designed for exploitation, monetary profit, or monetary exchange. Lastly, I will conclude with my thoughts on active resistance and dreams for anti-capitalist farming futures.
defined only by cash money.
Why I consider the dominance of corporate culture in farming toxic and worthy of a
tine on the pitchfork is that it immediately structures the goals of the farm toward profit, toward commodity production, toward toiling in semi-conscious slavery for money and not the actual fruits of our labour. The farm’s value is economic production, not community sustenance or resilience. Imagine if instead of producing for corporate capitalist goals, we instead farmed as an integral ecosystem function, a skill and service to support community viability, a gift to bring us together with nature in relationship, at the table to sustain each other in the visceral, ecstatic way we experience the zest of fresh, intimately produced foods—not just an opportunity to consume, but to instead produce something new, necessary, restorative, and beautiful in the act and result of consuming. Farming for profit sells it short.
Modern farming more closely resembles debt-bondage than successful entrepreneurship. These facts are well known. But the question remains: if this has been brought to the attention of the public, why has so little been done about it? Why have we not had farmers take up their pitchforks in collective arms?
What no other farmer has asked me is, “Could we share or collaborate?” This lack of community groupthink reveals our disconnection from nature in the pursuit of its subjugation. We have lost the power of nature’s swarm intelligence to work together for mutual benefit “in real life”, even as artificial intelligence algorithms start to use this as an operating system premise for our virtual landscapes. Rural geography and demographics present barriers to this cooperation. The farm co-ops of the past were intensely local, particularly given the practical challenges of moving heavy equipment. As rural land is parcelled off and sold for residential use, there are far less farmers actually farming, particularly with the aging demographics of farmers in Ontario. Over 60% of all farmers in Canada are over the age of 55, and as of 2021, only 12% of farmers have a succession plan. In the twenty years between 1991 and 2011, the number of farms decreased 25% across the country, and in the decade from 2011 to 2021, it decreased almost another 8%. In 30 years, Canada lost around a third of its farms. Canada now has under 190,000 farms across the country. That 12% with a succession plan means that under 23,000 farms have a somewhat viable future across our country. It’s hard to find community because the community is rapidly shrinking and has no plan to sustain or build itself.
Land privatization and severance is a problem that debilitates farms, farmers, and eaters for short-term profit. Farms are often most economically productive when sold. Whether severing the land for sale, or selling the whole farm, the farm as an agricultural basis for production of life-sustaining goods is necropolitical by capitalist design. Fields that previously yielded a few hundred dollars’ worth of hay each year can now be sold for upwards of a million dollars as a “vacant” lot for residential building here in Prince Edward County. However, in doing so, farmers lose food security (for themselves and/or their livestock) and the ability to be resilient, to respond to local emergent needs and grow something different. They also lose all the ecosystem functions that land provides.
It is ironic that to be a farmer and own a tractor, you likely need a non-farming job. The poverty of farmers is high, and so is food insecurity as a result. It’s likely your other “off farm” job(s) will “bring home the bacon” to feed your family. This individualist isolation and precarity due to privatization is precisely the formula for the third tine on the capitalist pitchfork.
Fear and control are not abundantly on the radar of the privileged in free, democratic societies, but in farming they are seen and felt, even if not named. The clearest and most reproduced examples I have experienced in farming centre on litigation. Since farming in Ontario, I have been cautioned about potential litigation for: letting others pet my horses (“they might lose a finger and sue you—it happened to so and so!”); selling preserves (“botulism!”) from an uninspected, non-commercial kitchen (“is that a legal ph level?”); free- ranging my chickens (“they’ll cause a car accident and you’ll be liable!”); raising dairy goats (“without a quota?”) ; asking for all parts of my pigs from the abattoir (“it’s illegal”); trying to enforce minimum distance setbacks from our barn with encroaching residential development (“get a lawyer”); selling at a farmers’ market (“do you have off-farm liability insurance?”); considering slaughtering my own chickens on the farm (“it’s illegal to then sell them”); wanting nitrate-free bacon (“it’s illegal to sell without nitrates”); selling ungraded eggs (“it’s illegal if off the farm”); and wanting to share unpasteurized milk (“don’t even dream about the illegal white market!”). The effect of this fear is control but also economic and non- economic limitations. Even forms of sharing are illegal and regulated in farming.
What I find most interesting about regulatory pressures is the targeted population. To me, it seems we have this backwards. Consider organic certification. The cost and regulatory burden is incredibly demanding to certify that a product has not been sprayed with known neurotoxins that cause birth defects, contaminate water runoff, and poison soils for up to eight years subsequently. Doesn’t it seem the labelling should be on the product that causes those human and ecological health hazards instead of the opposite? “Conventional” ag (made to sound both morally dominant and nostalgic somehow by the phrase) is toxically pervasive, and yet completely legal. What’s illegal is calling your pesticide- free carrot “organic” when it’s not certified organic.
The lack of ability to work outside the rules means it’s hard to create new working models. I can teach consumers how to use all parts of the pig, but I cannot sell them all parts due to the regulatory rules the abattoir is subject to. I can create a small, working dairy to nourish our community and increase local food security, but to take my goat milk off the farm or sell it, I must participate in a quota system (whereby I wouldn’t have the freedom to sell, barter, or give away the goat milk as I please). These regulations are designed to serve capitalist masters, not increase food resiliency or farm viability. Regulatory pressures cause geographic inequities, particularly with the decline of small abattoirs and egg grading facilities for small farmers. For commercial farmers, they simply create their own abattoir or egg grading facility. The regulatory system is also privatized.
This chronic debilitation has produced high levels of stress, mental health concern, and even suicide among farmers. Which leads us to the fourth prong on this pitchfork: having no way out.
Our purchasing attitudes are firmly entrenched in synchronicity and two-way exchange. Challenging consumers to reconsider their attachment to buying and receiving in one monetary transaction has proved a mind-bending exercise in “epistemic de-linking”. I ask those wanting my beautiful bok choy the following questions: How could we bring more folks into this transaction to build community? Should you pay for it—do you need sustenance or support right now? If you do want to pay, do you have to use money? What else could you offer? Do you have to pay me or is there a more cyclical way to “pay” it forward to benefit community (and thus, by the nature of our ecosystem interconnection and radical relationship, my farm also)? Does this way of valuing produce add to its value? Is the bok choy suddenly something much more?
Admittedly, this may be too much to think about for one bodacious brassica. But what if from this sustainable abundance and community-based resiliency we could abandon capitalism and instead orient our economies to be life-supporting, asynchronous, symbiotic, and multidirectional? Perhaps most strikingly, people have a hard time considering how they can participate outside of capitalism. People struggle to identify or value skills and are reliant on monetary equivalents to define value (i.e., one hour of my time is worth $x, which I can exchange for $x worth of tomatoes). Neoliberalism asserts this is “fair market value”; but fair according to whom, and for whose benefit? Is the market value for those tomatoes fair when supermarket prices are based on modern slavery, cheap migrant labour, and astronomical externalized carbon costs? We have lost the critical analysis skills to deeply (re)consider our values and valuations; to create working alternatives. Dollars are our dominant skill.
Resistance needs cultivation for viability: we must become activist-farmers. These seeds do not germinate well when left in individualist capitalism; they need support, solidarity, community. This is the hardest part. I still plant my gardens alone. No one is yet free, liberated from the pitchfork’s prongs to come plant with me. We are all in the dog-strangling vine chokehold and taught that competition is how we will be the one to survive. Even when we can bring cooperation into our epistemology, we often face barriers of fear, geography, and lack of creativity due to our systemic debilitation. The community needs to be local, and local rural politics make anti-capitalist farming even more of an outlier idea. I think about the patience of farming. Despite having to wait for the harvest for months, sometimes years, I am still so hopeful and bursting with anticipatory joy when I plant that seed. Instead of capitalist norms of immediate extraction, we need the remedy of perennial crops. We need radical anti-capitalist collectivity as resiliency in farming.